


The Tide Rises and So Do We

by Margo_Kim



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Developing Friendships, Dreams and Nightmares, Gen, Post-Demands of the Qun, Self-Hatred, Tal-Vashoth Iron Bull, The Qun
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 12:23:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12631002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: Adaar and The Iron Bull discuss demons and dreams. The extent to which Bull intimately knows both those subjects, he keeps to himself.





	The Tide Rises and So Do We

Adaar made them tea.

She moved with the exaggerated delicacy that too many Vashoth adopted, a physical apology for taking up so much space. The Iron Bull moved that way himself at times, in small rooms and jittery crowds. He had always been the largest even among qunari, always careful not to hurt, not to scare, not to loom when looming was uncalled for. Maybe that was why Hissrad had so easily walked into the role of The Iron Bull—he already moved like one who had left the Qun.

“You are not a mage,” Adaar said, seating herself across from him. The chairs in her bedroom were built large, but she still perched at the edge, as if she did not trust it to hold her weight. “You will never truly be vulnerable to the wiles of demons, not like we are.” She tapped a talon against the side of her mug, and for a moment the tea inside glowed before a wisp of light floated up above the surface and disappeared in the steam. She smiled at him. “Demons are wild about that. And perhaps somewhere, not knowing why, an Arvaarad just grew frightened.”

It was bait; there was a hook in the edge of her smile. Bull didn’t rise to it, didn’t imagine she expected him to. It was an old argument, and irrelevant now. Adaar had been born to a necromancer with scarred lips, who raised her with perfect certainty of the Qun’s evils. If The Iron Bull agreed or disagreed with her, what did it matter anymore. He was Tal Vashoth. He and Adaar’s mother had so much in common, here on the other side of the Storm Coast rendezvous.

“But demons could still possess me,” The Iron Bull said instead.

Adaar inclined her head, more in acknowledgement than agreement. “One could, if it suited a demon and you agreed to be possessed.”

“How do I avoid that?”

“Don’t agree.”

The Iron Bull glowered. “I’d appreciate more than that, Boss.”

“A secret mage trick?” Adaar sipped her tea. “Do you imagine we’re told more? Circle mages learn this lesson in more formal terms, perhaps Vivienne can lead you some liturgy some evening, but the underlying point is always the same. The Fade is a world of will. If your will is stronger than the demon’s, you will win. Most demons won’t try very hard. They’re vendors on the street hawking their wares. If you say ‘no’ firmly enough, they won’t waste their time on you.”

“Most demons. What about the rest of them?”

“There’s always some merchants that don’t know when to quit,” Adaar said. “But they won’t be attracted to you. It’s considerable effort to force your way into someone’s mind without their consent, if the demon is strong enough to manage it at all. They’re more likely to expend that energy on a mage.” She studied him. “You don’t seem comforted.”

“I’m not looking for comfort,” The Iron Bull said. “If you wanna comfort me, promise me you’ll kill me dead the second a demon possesses me.”

Adaar paused, surveying him with the neutral blankness she favored during judgment, before she pronounced execution. “If there is no other way.”

“You can’t risk waiting—”

“I am the Inquisitor,” she said firmly. “My job is to measure risk and assume it. You will not hurt anyone, not under a demon’s possession, I promise you. Whatever good or evil you do will be your choice. As it always has been.”

The Iron Bull grunted and leaned back in the chair. A fire burned in her hearth, a roaring flame supported by one log. Magic, casting soft orange flickers and a pleasant heat just the same as the real thing. Maybe right now there were demons pressing against the Veil, peering at the fire themselves, envious beyond words that Adaar had conjured the flames with a snap.

“I’ve been dreaming,” he said without looking at her.

She was quiet, waiting. When he offered no more, Adaar asked, “Since the Storm Coast?”

“Yeah.” Then he grimaced. Lies were a hard habit to shake. They wouldn’t do any good now. “No. Before.”

“Before?” Her teacup clinked as she put it down. “How long? How often?”

“A while.” He wiped his hands on his pants and tried not to clench his fists. “A little before joining up with you. Not every night. It was only… It wasn’t every night.”

“I see,” Adaar murmured. He could practically hear her turning words over in her head, seeing which words where added up to the most tact, the most grace. “Were you surprised by the dreaming?”

The Iron Bull laughed, but not really. A humorless huff of air. “I’d done it before, if that’s what you’re asking. Before. Years ago. Seheron.”

“Was that what prompted you to report for reeducation?” she asked.

“No.”

Adaar waited. She wasn’t afraid of silence. Most people were. Keeping your mouth shut was the best interrogation technique there was. Too bad Bull also knew that.

_Tama’s hand on his head, where his horns have just broken the surface, and she rubs the soreness away, singing a song she’ll tell him is a secret older than the Qun. He’s running through a desert for an oasis he knows is just over the next dune, but the dune he’s already climbing will never end. The fires of Par Vollen at night viewed from the guard towers, stars on land, stars in the sky, and constellations unknowable in both. There’s a door hidden behind the laundry in camp, no one knows but him, and it’s only as tall and wide as his hand but he goes through it easily enough._

Memories, softened and shaped by nighttime idle fancies nowhere as ugly and familiar as the relentless dread that battered him like the showers of rock and dirt blasted up by gaatlok. He hadn’t minded the dreams in Seheron. They took him somewhere that wasn’t Seheron.

When he told his reeducators this, they said that this was proof he should have reported himself far sooner.

A few minutes passed, Adaar sitting quietly, Bull looking away. Into the silence, she said, “Either you want my help or not.” It was not a cruel remark, merely a comment. Did he want her help or not? If he did, more must be offered. If he did not, then—

_You go through the small door, Hissrad, go through it in your mind and you’ll find nothing there but a demon wearing a tender face. Are you a fool? Are you a savage? You, who dealt justice unto those for whom discipline was an unbearable burden, for whom duty was a noose around their weak neck, you would spread yourself bare and inviting to creatures of vice and malice? Who are nothing but vice and malice? How poorly the tamassrans have failed, to have trusted you as adequate when you have swooned so long under an alluring lie. You are weak, Hissrad. You fear discipline. You court madness. You want a demon’s freedom, a savage’s freedom, the bas’s freedom—the freedom of following nothing but whim. That is what you crave. You are tired of being a part of a whole. You seek to be the whole, which is to say you seek to be a wild unfettered thing._

“Shit,” Bull said, stretching. He pictured opening a chest, folding up the mess of his memories at the bottom. He picture closing the chest. “My tea’s cold.”

She studied him, unblinking, and he stared right back, until she leaned back in her chair, steepled her fingers, and said, “Yes, that’s what happens when you let it sit while you brood.”

“Can’t brood and sip tea at the same time.”

“Of course you can, I do it all the time,” she said, reaching for his cup. She held her fingers against it until the steam curled up again. “That’s why they made me Inquisitor. My knack for multitasking. Drink.”

He drank. “You would have made a good tamassran. Bossy like that.”

She smiled without humor. “I didn’t think the Qun let people like me boss anyone.”

Bull went back to his tea. It tasted wrong, too bitter, too long steeped, too quickly heated again, but it felt good to have something warm in him. He hadn’t eaten all day, hadn’t thought about it until now when the heat poured down his throat and settled, burning, in his empty stomach.

Adaar rose and stood by the fire. She kept her back to him. He could hear her thinking.

“If it would settle your mind,” she said after a moment, “you could sleep with me tonight.”

He was already getting sloppy outside the Qun—he normally saw propositions coming. “Shit, I thought you and Josephine—”

Adaar turned to fix him with such a dead stare that The Iron Bull couldn’t help but grin and put his free hand up in surrender. “I mean you may sleep here in my room. In the bed. Not touching, if we can manage that.” She glanced at the bed, which was modestly decadent for one of their kind which meant it’d be intimate for two. “Or maybe I’ll explore your pillowy bosoms.”

“Not with those horns, Boss,” Bull said. Adaar’s were nearly broader and larger than his. Nearly. (Bull didn’t get hung up on shit like that but. It needed to be said. His horns were bigger.) In close contact they risked goring each other. “Why am I sleeping with you?”

“Because I’m a mage,” she said. She walked over to the dresser in the corner, where lived all the clothes Josephine had special ordered to make an Inquisitor out of a Vashoth mercenary. “The Fade is not a physical place as you might think of it. That was why magisters walking into it was so—” She snorted as she unclipped her earrings. “Inconvenient. To this very day. But there is a physical dimension to it, or the physical world effects it. Something like that. Ask Solas for the details.”

“Why don’t I ask you for the big picture?”

Adaar pulled out her hairpins and set her bun tumbling down. Her pure white hair fell like a snow blanket to her waist. “If you sleep next to a mage, demons will be attracted to the mage. Not you.” She glanced over her shoulder at him, her talons combing through her hair. “Big picture enough?”

He’d never seen her with her hair down. He didn’t get how she’d hidden it all up there. “You’d play bait?”

She smiled. “More like a bodyguard,” she teased, then shrugged. “If demons wish to come to me, they’ll come whether you’re here or not. If a demon wished to come to you—as unlikely as that is, I must remind you—they’ll come to me instead if I’m beside you. I’m a tastier meal. Close your eye. I’m changing into my sleep clothes.”

Bull closed his eye. He heard a drawer open and shut, then the gentle rustle of undressing. He settled back in the chair and listened. The fire crackled strangely burning only one log, and Adaar’s robes jangled as she stripped them off. The intimacy made his bad knee twinge.

“Does this trick work with any mage?” Bull asked.

“It should. Why? Do you have better prospects?”

“Thinking about Dalish, out in the field.” He thought for a moment. “Ma’am might let me curl up outside her door.”

“Your relationship is strange,” said Adaar.  “Are you staying here then?”

Bull knew his answer.

_Tama’s hands on his head, resting between his horns. “He got away. You got away.” The Herald’s Rest but the air smells like Par Vollen, the wet summer heat and the richest fruit almost overripe. A magister who is not Dorian but wears his face holds out his cupped hands. They overflow with pomegranate seeds, and he barters them for the mango Bull slices. The mango is rotten, and the bar is empty except for him. His Tama is somewhere in Skyhold, but he doesn’t know where. He just knows she’s here and she will never see him again. The mango is Krem’s head, cradled in Bull’s hands, the knife pressed against his lips as he asks, “How many qunari is one bas worth?” The air smells like Par Vollen, bodies and black powder._

Bull changed his answer, and said, “Sure, Boss.”

There was another moment of cloth sliding, and she said, “You can look.” She wore a grey shift that looked as old as her, and in her grey shift she looked old. Like the tamassran who guided the tamassrans. “I wasn’t going to bed right away,” she said. “You’re welcome to sleep now if you wish.”

“What are you doing?” he said, because he never wished to sleep.

“Something useless to our cause. I spent four hours today with Orlesians, I have paid my daily due to the Inquisition. I might read.”

“You want a round of chess?”

“I hate chess,” she said. “Why does everyone like chess? That’s all anyone plays around here, except Wicked Grace which is a ridiculous game that only Varric knows all the rules to and that’s because he cheats.”

Bull grinned. Adaar had last week gambled and lost to Varric the entirety of her purse, her future purse, several Inquisition forts, and the title of Inquisitor itself. Josephine had stepped in to stop Varric from collecting, though he insisted that he never would. _Who’d want that job?_ had been his defense. “What’s your game, then?”

“Charades.” She sighed dramatically. “Cullen never agrees to even a round.”

“Have Varric ask him,” Bull said. “Dwarf’s got some kind of blackmail material on the poor guy.”

Adaar smiled, a quiet little smile. She didn’t smile often in front of Bull. She wasn’t the smiling type mostly, and he’d bet she’d been just as serious before the whole weight of Thedas landed on her admittedly broad shoulders. Still. She smiled for Sera easily enough. Smiled for Dorian, Cassandra, Blackwall. Laughed at Varric’s stories, even if it was more quietly than the rest of the group’s drunken, braying guffaws. Still serious, solemn, always the Inquisitor, always the leader. But never so much as she was around him.

Bull knew Adaar didn’t like him. It didn’t bother him. Didn’t make her a worse boss, didn’t cost him jobs or time in the field. Didn’t cost him his boys. He was qunari—he had been qunari—and she hated qunari. That was fine, it was. It didn’t bother him.

He wasn’t qunari now. Wasn’t his choice. Hadn’t been his choice. Had been her choice, if you thought about it. She told him to call the surrender, so he called. That was what happened. He didn’t leave the Qun. The Qun had left him.

 _Fucking coward_ , he thought suddenly, with a vehemence that he knew must be savage. _Stupid fucking coward. Not Tal Vashoth. Just a failed Qunari. Piece of shit broken down failure, weak, spineless, codeless. Stupid fucking savage. Stupid, stupid, evil in my own laziness, can’t live by this code, can’t live by that one, can’t go back to reeducation one more time because it’s more fun drinking and fucking in the south._

“Sometimes,” Adaar said mildly, “demons may sound indistinguishable from yourself. That is where the danger lies. When they ask you to agree to something you may already believe.” Bull could not raise his head. So she came to him, with silent graceful steps, and rested her hand on the scalp between his horns. “Ask me what you do then,” she said.

“What do you do then,” he obliged, the words dripping out like blood.

“You do what you always do. You say no. You turn them down. You tell them to fuck off.” She gripped the base of his horn and forced his head up. “If you find yourself incapable of brooding and drinking tea at the same time, I recommend you drink tea instead.”

“Don’t suppose you could make that an order,” Bull rasped.

She raised an eyebrow. An elegant refusal. She could have been the greatest tamassran even with her mouth sewn shut. “Shall we play a game of chess then?” she asked.

“Nah,” Bull said. “Crappy game. Who even plays it?”

Adaar smiled at him again, such a tired smile on such a tired face that he felt like shit coming here, to her private quarters, to her private hours, another petitioner on the Inquisitor’s time. Knowing she hated the Qun, making her deal with Qun shit anyway.

_Selfishness, that’s how it always begins. You want what you want and it doesn’t matter what everyone else needs, you pathetic, stupid, savage, mad—_

“You know Diamondback?” Bull asked.

She looked pleasantly surprised. “Of course. I’m very bad at it.” She was. She played it with Varric frequently enough while never once winning, but she always lost with notably good spirits. “I’ll deal,” she said, which explained why she did so badly. The dealer always lost.

Bull tossed another log on the flagging fire, and watched the magic flames lap at the new fuel. Warmth was warmth, he thought, trying the argument out in his head to see how it sound. It wasn’t a lie, at least. He could work with that.

Adaar shuffled. Bull cut the deck. They played the first three rounds in silence. Adaar lost, but by a margin that was almost competitive. She smiled too much at her cards.

Bull offered to deal on the fourth round. As he did, he asked, “So you’re not expecting Josie tonight?”

Adaar snorted. “If I expected Josie in my bed, I’d have cut my nails by now. I don’t think she’s interested.”

“Don’t be stupid, Boss. She’s head over heels.”

“Tell her that.”

“I will.”

“Please don’t.”

“I’m getting conflicting orders here.”

“Welcome to the world outside the Qun.”  

They finished the round in silence. Adaar still lost. Bull swept up the cards and said, “Nah. That’s how it is in the Qun too.”

“Oh?” Adaar asked, and Bull had to chuckle at the exaggerated casualness of her tone. She rolled her eyes as she leaned back in her chair. Bull began dealing the cards. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

Bull’s hands didn’t falter. “You hate the Qun and you hate hearing about it."

“But I love bureaucratic gossip.”

“That why you keep asking Cassandra about the Chantry?”

 “Just so.” Adaar pick up her hand. She smiled. "Please, The Iron Bull. You must have something for me."

_Here was the freedom of the Qun: the freedom from thought. The freedom to follow orders. The freedom of the hand to be lifted by the arm. The Qun lifted the yoke of choices, the terrible infinity of the open sky. The tide rises, the tide falls, so lie on your back and float. Only swimmers drown._

_Here was the sweetness of the Qun: someone sleeps against your back as you sleep against someone else’s, and so on, a line of imekari too young for dreamless sleep. A nightmare comes, and comfort follows, no gap between the two. The body cannot be separate from itself, not until death, and the Qun is the body that embraces itself. There is no such thing as a lone qunari. There is no such thing as a lonely qunari. This, for a time, you can believe._

_Here was the demand of the Qun: there is a ship in the water and a camp on the hill, and both overflow with life. It would have taken the slightest reinforcement, the slightest foreknowledge to save them both. The test is where you put death, and the test is rigged. It would have been so simple to save everyone. The Qun decided that someone must die._

_The tide rises, the tide falls. The Qun says: dash yourself against the rocks. Adaar says: swim._

_Bull spends his nights dreaming of ships. He’s always liked the sea._

“Okay, Boss,” said Bull, picking up his own hand. “I’ll see what I got.”

 


End file.
